Quiet
Level 1. Scores 0 to 25. On what you have seen, your team does not speak up.
On what you have seen in the last month, your team does not speak up. Nobody told you that you were wrong with others present. Mistakes reached you another way. The quiet person stayed quiet. Concerns arrived second hand or not at all. This is a Quiet room, and the first thing to say about it is that the score describes the room, not your intentions.
The second thing to say is harder. You are the person the room is quietest around. A leader rating their own team's safety is rating the thing most likely to be hidden from them, so a Quiet result from a leader's chair is probably an understatement, not an overstatement. If five or more of your answers were "neither", read that as "I have not seen it", and take it seriously.
Quiet rooms are not usually made by unkind leaders. They are made by a few moments the leader has forgotten and the team has not: the time someone raised a problem and the response was about who, not what; the time a junior question got a look; the time pushback in a meeting was followed by a conversation afterwards. Nobody decided to go quiet. They just learned.
Consensus cultures have their own version of this, and I grew up in one. In a Swedish room nobody shouts and nobody storms out. Everyone nods. The meeting ends in agreement, and the real discussion starts in the corridor ten minutes later, in pairs, where it feels safe. That is not alignment. It is disagreement that has found a quieter place to live.
How I tell a client to spot it: watch what happens after the decision, because the meeting will not show you. Decisions that do not stick. The same topic back on the agenda a month later. Information that reaches you last and already filtered. Meetings that end by scheduling another meeting. If the room agreed and nothing moved, the room did not agree.
One thing to do this week, and it is not to announce that you want more candour, because a Quiet room hears that as a test. Instead, name one of your own mistakes in the next team meeting, in the first five minutes, plainly, with what you are doing about it. Then ask one specific question of one specific person: "What would you have done differently?" Not "any thoughts". One person, one question, and let the silence run.
Look at your lowest dimension. If it is Error, mistakes are the thing being hidden and the cost is arriving late. If it is Challenge, decisions are going unargued, and some of them are wrong. Either way, a team mode of this scale, when it ships, is the only way to see what you cannot.
Next step: the definition and the research behind psychological safety are on the what is psychological safety at work page. Start there before you try to fix the room.
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About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Psychological Safety Scale, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.